README.txt

Welcome to Bespin!
------------------
Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment on how to build an extensible Web code
editor using HTML 5 technology.
Project home page: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/bespin/
Live system: https://bespin.mozilla.com/
Thanks for downloading the code to the Bespin project. You can easily get
Bespin's Python server running on your local Mac or Linux machine (see note
about Windows below).
Getting Started
---------------
*** NOTE FOR LINUX USERS: If you are running on a Linux system, you will
likely need a "python-dev" (on Ubuntu, possibly python-devel elsewhere)
package installed, if you do not already have it.
Run::
python bootstrap.py --no-site-packages
to get the environment set up. This is built around virtualenv. All of the
required packages will automatically be installed. Once this is set up,
you can run::
source bin/activate
to enter the virtualenv. Alternatively, you can just prefix the commands you
run with "bin/". If you wish to restore your command line environment,
you can type "deactivate".
The first time around, you'll need to download Dojo and create the database::
paver dojo create_db
You can start up the development server (runs on localhost:8080) by running::
paver start
You can run the unit tests by running::
py.test backend/python/bespin
Updating the Required Files
---------------------------
If the "requirements.txt" file changes, you can re-install the
required packages by running::
paver required
You can also force upgrade all of the packages like so::
pip install -U -r requirements.txt
More Documentation
------------------
Documentation for Bespin's code and APIs are actually part of every
instance of the Bespin server. To view the docs on your local instance, just
browse to http://127.0.0.1:8080/docs/.
Contributing to Bespin
----------------------
For details see:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Bespin/Contributing
The source repository is in Mercurial at:
http://hg.mozilla.org/labs/bespin/
Note about running on Windows
-----------------------------
The current, up-to-date Bespin backend is written in Python. Because
Python is cross-platform, it should be possible (and likely not too
difficult) to make the backend work on Windows once Python 2.5 is
installed. However, this has not been tested and there are likely two
issues:
1. some libraries used by Bespin try to compile C code
2. some paths may not be correct on Windows systems